Consumer electronics mash-ups

As frustrated as one can get with the US sometimes, it is truly a marvelous land of plenty. In the past few months, I’ve run across some remarkable consumer items which I’d like to share with you.

A microwave oven with a radio in it. With a little tinkering, you may be able to take the FM signal coming into the radio and convert it into microwaves to cook the food. Lite jazz will cook that baked potato nice n’ slow or crank the hard rock station if you’re in a hurry to scorch your Healthy Choice.

A mounted deer head that sings and talks. I know you’re all familiar with that mounted bass that plays music, but this is a whole deer head we’re talking about here. I was too amazed to note any of the songs or whether the deer lip-synchs along, but I’m sure that when you plug this sucker in, whatever it does is wonderful. It’s singing taxidermy fer crissakes!

A refrigerator with a TV. For that 3-4 seconds it takes you to get a glass of orange juice when you’re away from the TV just in the other room. Oh, and if the TV part breaks, good luck getting it fixed. Also, there didn’t appear to be a Refrigerator Channel for viewing inside the fridge to avoid letting that precious cool out while your teenage son stands with the door (and his mouth) open for three minutes deciding what to eat/drink.

I had the same thought when I was on LG’s site looking for flat-screen monitors: “Who the heck would actually stand at their fridge and watch TV?” I could understand maybe an above-the-stove TV, if you really can’t get away from your favorite show while you cook. But, the fridge - nobody actually takes that long at this particular applicance.

Everyone makes fun of the refrigerator TV, but I would love for a decent one (i.e. a decent TV in the door of a decent fridge — the ones I’ve seen are all essentially gimmicks) to come on the market. It’s not about being able to watch TV while fetching food, but about combining two pieces of hardware in what is generally the most crowded room in the house.

My kitchen is arranged in such a way that the seats at the island breakfast bar thing face the stove, the microwave, and the fridge. The only place to put a TV without losing a lot of counter space (and subjecting the TV to a lot of splashes etc.) is directly behind the only comfortable place to sit. I like to watch the TV news in the morning while eating breakfast, so a TV on the front of the refrigerator would be great.

Yes, I have thought of a mirror, but that works only if you look at the mirror from a single angle.

Although my kitchen is almost too small to make a television/fridge combo even more impractical than your suggesting (actually, it’s so small as to almost make a fridge impractical), I can actually see that being useful. I wouldn’t mind having CNN on in the morning while having coffee and a bagel and making my sandwich for lunch. That’s old-school multi-tasking. Also, it’d be cool to be able to actually work along with a cooking show I recorded earlier on TiVo and beamed to the kitchen television/fridge. Of course, now I might just be getting greedy in my convergence-induced stupor.

Oh, couldn’t the fridge also have the FM tuner built in. Also, maybe just a video of the singing dear head. That’d do for me while I watched it on my fridge.

Or… instead of worrying about missing that key part of the game while you fetch a beer, why not just add the ability to pause live TV? A TiVo is like $50 now, c’mon people. You get your own super-slo-mo instant replays too.

The particular model of singing-mounted-deer-head I saw not only did Willie Nelson, it also had an input jack for a microphone. Unfortunately, I didn’t see that function in action, but hopefully it does some sort of lipsync to the microphone input.

Almost nobody uses their TiVo to actually watch live tv though. You record stuff and then watch it later. Partially this is due to convenience and partly because you can only record or watch one thing at a time, but you can watch anything that’s been pre-recorded whenever you want since it doesn’t require the use of the tuner.

That said the idea of a fridge-mounted TV is pretty much in line with what everyone else has been saying. It’s designed to put a TV into a small enviroment by converging it with a large item that pretty much just sits there with plenty of empty space. Frankly I can see these being pretty popular in Japan (always a fan of gadgets and convergence not to mention the often cramped housing) and to a lesser extent in Europe.

In my mind the stupid TV idea is the one with colored ambient light. While ambient light is important to prevent eyestrain and thus make your picture look its best this is really only an issue with CRTs, not plasma displays. Besides I personally think it would be a bit distracting.

I personally think the tv in fridge idea is a bad one simply because people dont want to spend the extra money. Thats all! A few guys will get it, mabe the rappers on cribs, but I just dont see a huge market for this. People do care about money, at least where I live.

I would more prefer an OLED screen, small one, in various places that would show something simple. Weather, stocks, news… But even then, I think I enjoy having to go to certain parts of the house to do certain things. I am sure I could use the cardio…

I personally think the 3 products are useless.
The deer head is freaky. The only good thing I could use something like that for is to freak my older relatives out by making it sing when they least expect it.

As for the fridge, I agree with everyone who said it is completely useless as no one stands in front of their fridge long enough to watch anything. Plus when you’re in front of the fridge, you’re opening it and looking inside to get something, not staring at it’s front watching something.

When it comes to the microwave oven, well it’s the most useful of the 3 useless products, I guess.

A refrigerator with a built-in flat screen is quite a good idea and will probably be ubiquitous in a few years. But why leave it at the screen being used for watching television? It could just as well be a touchscreen that’s connected to your computer and allows you to play music, watch movies, check your email, and be alerted to incoming IMs.

Yes, it’s a 6 foot tall inflatable “snow globe” yard decoration, that lights up and has “real” blowing snow inside! They put up a display of these in the supermarket near me, and I stood rooted to the spot in awe.

I saw the Talking Deer Head in Wal-Mart yesterday in the Sporting Goods Dept. with the microphone plugged in. You can not only sing along with the songs - you can use it to scare the hell out of your friends (or shoppers, it would seem).

A father and son couldn’t stop playing with it. They were hiding in an aisle and making the deer talk while unexpecting shoppers walked by. It was pretty hilarious. It should definitely be on the lineup for Candid Camera.

forget refrigerators, what i really want is the star trek food thing. you just push some buttons next to a rectangle in the wall and it makes that psssht noise and your meal appears. on a plate. although i could do without the square glasses, because, actually, my mouth is not square. liquid would dribble right down your - in my case, unquestionably red - uni.

I want RFID tags on everything in my fridge. I want my fridge to know what I have stored inside it and how long it’s been there. When I need to go grocery shopping, I can print out a list of items that may be going bad (milk, eggs, etc..) and items that I had in there but are no longer there(probably eaten/thrown out).

If it plays TV too, then great.. If it only plays TV, then I will pass.

I can’t see the use of TV fridge thing as I haul my TV all over the house and use it a weird angles and stuff, but if I had a singing Deer Head I would probably never watch TV again - not unless I could get a mutated deer head with giant TV eyes so I could watch TV on the deer while it spoke the subtitles.

That’s it. I can’t be happy until I have a singing Megaloceros giganteus with TVs in it’s mutatedly oversized eyes that will speak and sing along with every show I watch.

And if my fridge is going to keep track of something, it should be able to give my boyfriend a not-at-all-mild electric shock if he spills something in the fridge and does not clean it up.